Minimise the tentacles on the OctopOSS. Keep it simple
“…as technology gets more complicated, it becomes more difficult for buyers to acquire the skills needed to make even a basic assessment of value. Without such an assessment, it’s hard to get a project going, and in particular hard to get one going the right way.” Tom Nolle. Have you noticed that over the last […]
Over the years in OSS, I’ve spent a lot of my time helping companies create their OSS / BSS strategies and roadmaps. Sometimes clients come from the buy side (eg carriers, utilities, enterprise), other times clients come from the sell side (eg vendors, integrators). There’s one factor that seems to be most commonly raised by […]
For most end-customers, the OSS/BSS we create are merely back-office systems that they never see. The closest they get are the customer portals that they interact with to drive workflows through our OSS/BSS. And yet, our OSS/BSS still have a big part to play in customer experience. In times where customers can readily substitute one […]
The last four posts have discussed how our OSS/BSS need to cope with different modes of working to perform effectively. We started off with the thread of “group flow,” where multiple different users of our tools can work cohesively. Then we talked about how flow requires a lack of interruptions, yet many of the roles […]
Our most recent post last week discussed the research organisations like DARPA (Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency) and Google are investing into group flow for the purpose of group effectiveness. It cites the cost of training ($4.25m) each elite Navy SEAL and their ability to operate as if choreographed in high pressure / noise environments. […]
Yesterday’s post talked about the difference between “flow state” and “office state” in relation to OSS delivery. It referenced a book I’m currently reading called Stealing Fire. The post mainly focused on how the interruptions of “office state” actually inhibit our productivity, learning and ability to think laterally on our OSS. But that got me […]
TM Forum’s Open Digital Architecture (ODA) White Paper begins with the following statement: Telecoms is at a crucial turning point. The last decade has dealt a series of punishing blows to an industry that had previously enjoyed enviable growth for more than 20 years. Services that once returned high margins are being reduced to commodities […]
Fault / Alarm management tools have lots of strings to their functionality bows to help operators focus in on the target/s that matter most. ITU-T’s recommendation X.733 provided an early framework and common model for classification of alarms. This allowed OSS vendors to build a standardised set of filters (eg severity, probable cause, etc). ITU-T’s […]
What are the key features / functions of an OSS and BSS? You may recall a recent article that provided a discussion around the demarcation between OSS and BSS, which included the following graph: Note that this mapping is just my demarc interpretation, but isn’t the definitive guide. It’s definitely open to differing opinions (ie […]
Let me start today with a question: Does your future OSS/BSS need to be drastically different to what it is today? Please leave me a comment below, answering yes or no. I’m going to take a guess that most OSS/BSS experts will answer yes to this question, that our future OSS/BSS will change significantly. It’s […]
I spent some time with a client going through their OSS/BSS yesterday. They’re an Australian telco with a primarily home-grown, browser-based OSS/BSS. One of its features was something I’ve never seen in an OSS/BSS before. But really quite subtle and cool. They have four tiers of users: Super-admins (the carrier’s in-house admins), Standard (their in-house […]
Network slicing allows operators to segment their network and configure each different slice to the specific needs of that customer (or group of customers). So rather than the network infrastructure being configured for the best compromise that suits all use-cases, instead each slice can be configured optimally for each use-case. That’s an exciting concept. The […]
There’s a famous Zig Ziglar quote that goes something like, “You can have everything in life you want, if you will just help enough other people get what they want.” You could safely assume that this was written for the individual reader, but there is some truth in it within the OSS context too. For […]
After Telstra’s NaaS (Network as a Service) program won a TM Forum excellence award, I promised yesterday to share a post that describes why I’m so excited about the concept of NaaS. As the title suggests above, NaaS has the potential to be as big a paradigm shift for networks (and OSS/BSS) as Agile has […]
Over the years, I’ve been asked the question many times, “what’s the difference between OSS (Operational Support Systems) and BSS (Business Support Systems)?” I’ve also been asked, albeit slightly less regularly, how OSS and BSS map to TM Forum standards like the TAM (the Application Map) and eTOM (enhanced Telecommunications Operations Map). To my knowledge, […]
OSS projects are full of risks. We all know it. OSS projects have “earned” a bad name because of all those risks. On the other side of that same coin, OSS projects disappoint, in part I suspect because stakeholders expect such big things from their resource investments. Ask anyone familiar with OSS projects and you’ll […]
Back in the earliest days of OSS (and networks for that matter), it was the telcos that generated almost all of the innovation. That effectively limited innovation to being developed by the privileged few, those who worked for the government-owned, monopoly telcos. But over time, the financial leaders at those telcos felt the costs of […]
All OSS products are excellent these days. And all OSS vendors know what the most important functionality is. They already have those features built into their products. That is, they’ve already added the all-important features at the left side of the graph. But it also means product teams are tending to only add the relatively […]
Network operators spend huge amounts on building and maintaining their OSS/BSS every year. There are many reasons they invest so heavily, but in most cases it can be distilled back to one thing – improving operational efficiency. And our OSS/BSS definitely do improve operational efficiency, but there are still so many sources of friction. They’re […]
The traditional telco (and OSS) ran at different speeds. Some tasks had to happen immediately (eg customers calling one another) while others took time (eg getting a connection to a customer’s home, which included designs, approvals, builds, etc), often weeks. Our OSS have processes that must happen sequentially and expediently. They also have processes that […]
